Wherever marketers discuss about growth hacking strategy, these days, they will always talks about Conversion rate optimization (CRO) too. And how important it is to optimize your website for higher conversion, But the first step towards understanding the Conversion optimization strategy is to fully understandWhat it is,And what it is not!

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Let me give you a few definitions: If we consider growth hacking as a chain of data-driven experiments, Then, conversion rate optimization is one of the most efficient analytical methods to improve your website’s performance to attract, and engage more customers.

In other words,

CRO refers to the most essential rules of running a successful online business; Your customers. It’s is all about understanding what your users are interested in when they visit your site, and give it to them right away.

Conversion rate optimization best practices has nothing to do with your traffic, SEO, or your brand name.

It certainly has nothing to do with guess-work, or luck.

CRO refers to a set of data-driven digital marketing experiments that help you identify which part of your landing page, website, and business should you optimize to attract more customers, and begin having high quality engagement with your visitors.

In conversion optimization experiments, a growth hacker will monitor customer behavior and customer interaction with a specific landing page and conduct a set of test to find out what landing page has the potential to generate better outcomes.

Then, the growth hacker himself/herself should analyze the data and outcome to create a conversion optimization know-how, and customer journey optimization patterns that eventually increase the conversion rate.

Since different businesses have different goals, and metrics, it’s hard to define a rock-solid method for conducting a successful conversion optimization experience but, in fact, if you set your conversion goals right, You can achieve great results and higher ROI.

Conversion optimization strategy might vary from business to business, It might lead you to change the call to action text, Polish your tone, and optimize your posts, or texts or even shifting a few UI elements, but end of the day the main outputs that you should expect from your CRO experiment are:

Higher conversion rate,

Higher customer acquisition rate.

Have you ever wondered how do some websites are so good with customer acquisition? And they break through the conversion rate optimization strategy,

and convert visitors to leads like nuts?

Well, I was wondering too, until I found this…

Whether you decide to hire a growth hacker or you want to take charge to grow your own business, there is one important factor that can never miss;

“it is conversion rate optimization.”

Whether you are launching your mobile app, or you just want to get new customers to your online business conversion rate optimization helps you analyze your online sales funnel, and optimize it for higher conversion.

In other words, whether you are running an e-commerce business, Writing a blog, or even if you are in service industry, and offering consulting services, you can easily use the conversion optimization techniques right away and

When it comes to growth hacking strategies, the rule of thumb is that all of your digital marketing strategies, including CRO must ultimately help you grow your business faster,

and this rule applies to almost every single niche.

“The good news is that in this conversion optimization guide I have outlined a set of actionable strategies that you can use for your website, and achieve higher conversion rates.”

CRO Essentials: Why should conversion optimization matter to you?

Good question.

If you plan to reduce marketing costs, and increase your revenue, while lowering your cost of customer acquisition (CAC), Then you must very much pay attention to CRO,And here is why?

For every visitor that and visit your website, you have a chance to make money and generate revenue but that does not happen just like that!

You must find out what makes your customer happier, and what could intrigue them to spend more time on your website

You can try different combinations ofBackground colors, types of visuals (Animated, or solid)Different Lead Magnets Value proposition,Specific tone of message,button text, and button color,etc.and figure out which combination appeals to majority of your visitors.

You can use the 80-20 rule and optimize your website to match their persona. This way you’re indirectly suggesting your visitors to stay longer and explore more, before switch to your rivals.

Before we move on, let me share with you a few essential abbreviations that you must remember about CRO strategy.

Call to Action (CTA)

In online business, because you don’t see your customers face to face, you need to find ways to engage with them and sell your product.

Call to actions, are in fact your Promoters, Your virtual sales person, Your Bar tender, Your driver, They exist to grab your customer’s attention, and encourage them to TAKE ACTIONS.

You may see different forms of CTA in different websites, the most popular call to actions are:Buy NowGet Instant AccessJoin NowSign Up etc.

A/B Testing, also known as Split Testing

A/B testing is a process of experimenting different versions of a landing page and sending equal amount of traffic to the pages to see which page converts more visitors to leads, Or which page engages better with visitors, or which page do users like to explore more (It all may vary based on your KPI, metrics, and goals)

Once the best page is identified, you can make that page as your primary page, and drive 100% of traffic to the most effective page.

In other words, higher conversion rate can lead to higher ROI, efficient customer acquisition strategy, happier customers, and lower cost of marketing.

Conversion Funnel

Simply speaking, conversion funnels of online businesses is the shortest/most efficient way that a user can find what s/he is looking for and either purchase, or acquire it.

For example, When you go to EBay, or Amazon, You’ll either use the search functionality on home page, Or you’re directly coming from search engines like google, And you’ll land on the product page. Then you’ll make the purchase and receive your product.That’s an example of a conversion funnel.

The true nature, and classification of conversion rate optimization won’t change but the result will vary based on your defined goals.

Let’s have a closer look at a few scenarios and see how can you optimize your conversion rates.

Scenario #1: Increase Revenue:

If your goal is to increase your revenue, then the conversion rate you must look into should be the number of customers who bought your products, packages, or solutions VS the total number of people who showed interest in it.

Scenario #2: Get more Leads

In case you are trying to get more leads and engage them in your sales funnel, you should monitor your conversion rate base on the number of people who are approached (or they might approach you) against the number of qualified leads.

Scenario #3: Brand Awareness

In the event that you are looking for better brand awareness, then you should not be looking for tangible results in short term. However, if you implement re-targeting strategies (I’ll get to this soon), you can monitor your ROI conversion rate.

Lead Conversion Funnel Versus Sales Funnel

When it comes to advanced growth hacking, and scaling your business Your sales funnel should look like this.

You must define your source of traffic, And drive each customer segment to the right landing page.

In many businesses, their sales funnel looks like this: The first step is acquiring leads. It normally happens by getting in touch with customers, either through cold calls, email campaigns or face to face meeting, etc.

As soon as you have the lead’s attention you’ll focus on proving your value proposition and convert the lead to opportunity. (It means the lead is interested in knowing more about your offer)

Then, once you anticipate that the success rate and probability of closing the deal you’d go ahead and pitch the customer and sell your product or service.(There are a lot more to it but since this article is not about sales strategy, I simplified it as much as possible)

The conversion funnel is somehow different

In general, conversion funnel has 4 phases:

In the early stages, the customers will get to know about your offer, and your business

If they are interested, they will research about your product, your promise, and indeed your business conduct

If you manage to build a good reputation, and they hear good things from others, they will most probably try your Offer

Once your service is proven to be worthy of what you charge for, and can address their pains and gains, they will then make a payment and buy your core offer.

Now if you are here for a long haul and take care of your customers, and if they really like your product, they will recommend it to others or tell others about it, which leads to referrals and new customers.

Implementing conversion optimization strategy and aligning it with your sales funnel help you supersize your packages, and increase your revenue. But it all goes back to your your business model, type of product, and nature of your business.

The first thing that you’ve setup to get your customer’s contact information is your lead magnet, And your lead magnet is a free report, or a free download, or a free trial, etc. Something that does not cost you much to create, And customers can get it instantly, for free.

In this case your conversion funnel should look like this.

The first step is “Customer Discovery”

You’ll be directing traffic to your website, It could be from Direct, and organic traffic, Or Advertisement campaigns like PPC, OR Forums, etc. and once visitors are landed on your landing pages, they will come to know about your blog posts, Your lead magnet, or even your product, and pay a visit to your product page.

The trick here is to implement “customer journey optimization” strategy also known as CJO strategy to engage with your visitors, and lead the through the path that translate to a purchase, or an opt-in

Because customers who come from different source, have different needs.

The Next step is Engagement

Influencer marketing, and branding play a huge role at this stage because since customers don’t have a tool to measure your credibility, they will use the eye ball test.

If you manage to pass the eye ball test, By showing enough evidence that your business is credible, Or social proofs from previous customers, Or even positive reviews on the internet, you have a good chance to see your prospects in the next stage.

It’s time for your customers to Register

Here is the truth:

Unfortunately, since there are plenty of scams, no one is willing to buy from you the first time they visit your site.

At this stage, it’s best to offer a lead magnet, and don’t push for sales. You can try to encourage them to opt-in to your subscriber list by offering a well-designed whitepaper to download, or something that fits their need without charging them.

Once your visitors decided to exchange their information for your lead magnet, it’s time for a little push.

Let’s give it a try! The Trial Phase

Your customers might not be ready to buy your core offer yet, So you can offer them your Bait, Which is an interesting offer that offers between 7% to 20% of functionalities of your core product “at cost“, “with no margin“. or even for free

If what you’ve offered them for free in previous stage was a case study about the values of your product And they have opted in with that free report, You can offer them a comprehensive, or premium report Plus limited access to your product for testing purpose Either for free, at a very low cost or great value for money, This way, your leads will automatically move don your conversion funnel, and download/try your trial product.

Promotion: When and what to promote to get higher conversion rate

Don’t be a greedy business owner who just care about dollars and figures. You must give enough time to your customers and let them enjoy the free trial, but you should also engage with them and make sure they are getting the best out of their offer.

In fact, the secret to having higher conversion rate, especially when it comes to converting leads to paying customers is in genuine follow ups during the trial period.

You must know that not everyone knows how to use your product, besides, they might sign up for free trial and don’t even use it.

As an entrepreneur or a growth hacker, you can automate your engagements for trial period, but you must make sure to personalize it too.

You can send them the “how-to guides” and practical, yet, easy to understand supporting materials to help them understand your unique value proposition and fall in love with your product.

Closing The Deal

This is where your leads, and opportunities convert to paying customers.At this stage, you managed to get your customers on your landing page, or checkout page And they are ready to key in the credit card information.

Make sure that your sales letter, whether it’s a Video sales letter (VSL), or a Hybrid sales letter Includes everything that your customer need to know

Include your Pricing model And try to simplify it as much as possible If there are payment plans, try to highlight the one that managed to attract more customers in your conversion rate optimization experiments And make sure to simplify your checkout forms.

Once your customer paid for your service,

… It does not matter if you are offering a tangible product, or virtual product,Or even if you are selling one off services, or your product is designed with recurring pricing model …

You must focus on Email marketing activities to engage with your new customers to ensure your customers are happy with their purchase. And your value proposition is well perceived,

In fact, if you manage to keep your customers happy, You can get them back to buy again Or refer you to their friends and get new customers, organically.

How to Design a Conversion Rate Optimization Plan

The basis of CRO strategies are on valid data And you need to collect valid data, as much as possible But not any data!

While those data are very important You must make sure that you’re analyzing your customer behavior too

If you have a solid data-mine to begin with, That’s perfect, Otherwise build your plan based on hypothesis and do your best to find the validity of your hypothesis.

Why should you collect data?

One of the most important lessons I learned after spending $252,000 on conversion rate optimization is the importance of gathering both qualitative and quantitative data before beginning to test. If you don’t gather data, then you’re left guessing what to change based on your gut. This isn’t a good idea and can lead to wasted time and money. It’s better to spend a month or so gathering data so you’re testing based on insights you’ve learned, not on your gut feeling. Without taking this step, you’ll end up running a lot of tests that fail.

What to test in your CRO plan?

Try to understand what these data, numbers, and interactions means before proposing a solution

Concentrate on testing your hypothesis, no proving them. You can easily pivot and find a better strategy

Keep an open mind when analyzing your data, Being Bios about your goals may interfere your interpretation

Don’t interrupt the experiment, and run each test for at least a month; Remember conversion optimization is an ongoing strategy

How to collect data?

There are free and paid tools that help you collect data. You need to use the right tools to collect data about

Number of unique visitors

Bounce rate

Overall traffic from different sources

New Vs Existing users

Cohort Analysis

Segmentation

Goal and conversion analysis,

etc.

Here is a list of five popular tools that you can use for your conversion optimization experiments.

Qualaroo

Google Analytics (free)

KISSMetrics

Mixpanel

Segment.io

Now, if you don’t have a budget to spend on paid analytics tools, you can use the most powerful free tool …

As a webmaster you have already setup your google analytics, and google search console. Why not using them?

Once you logged in to your Google Analytics dashboard, Scroll down, and go to Conversions.

If you don’t see any result, It’s probably because you have not set your Conversion goals. Once you set a few conversion goals, and let Google Analytics collect data for a week or so, You will be able to monitor your conversion goals, and analyze data for conversion optimization purposes.

While it’s tempting to look at the conversion results, the most important factor is to look for drop offs, and find out what have you missed. How many customers have you lost and Why that happened?

You need to have a close look at your conversion funnel and Find out what stage of your funnel are you loosing visitors, and leads. And focus on optimizing it and consider what changes you can possibly make to increase conversion rate.

As soon as you’ve spotted the drop offs, you can write your first hypothesis for each step of your conversion funnel It might be the Content that need to be optimized, It might be the page speed, or loading time, it could be the font size, etc. etc.

How does Conversion Optimization Help You Improve User Experience (UX).

The way we look at user experience in growth hacking, customer acquisition, and conversion rate optimization is totally different from Branding and Design stand point.

Al thought these strategies are all connected, and should complement each other, At this stage we are not concern about how does your website look Because Customer journey optimization, and User Experience should take to account the essential CRO elements such as

– How easy can your visitors Navigate through your website– How easy it is to find the right product or service on your site– How fast does it load the pages.– How user friendly is your sales process, and check out page.– etc…

Apart from dozens of benefits that a great UX bring to your business, paying attention to your user experience can help you reduce two disastrous factors that kills your conversion rate.

Exit Rate

Exit Rate is factor that you need to monitor for each page. Exit rate has negative impact on your conversion rate because it refers to the percentage of visitors who did not take any action and left the website.

Because the exit rate shows you the last age before your visitors leave, you can focus on increasing the user experience in those pages, and conduct a few experiments to see what makes people leave without taking any actions.

If you’re experiencing very high exit rate on your product page That could indicate that you’re either not able to connect with your visitors through your Value proposition Or you have either over-priced, or under-priced your service, Or your sales letter and copy writing is not engaging Or maybe there is a technical issue with the landing page.

Bounce Rate

Your Bounce Rate is another factor you have to closely monitor.

The lower the bounce rate the better, Because it refers to the number of visitors who don’t move on to the next page, and leave your website as soon as they land on the firs page. Since every page has its own bounce rate, you can investigate the main reason that visitors leave and optimize the page for higher conversion.[I have explained everything here about how to optimize your landing page and improve your bounce rate]

How to set conversion goals?

To make sure that all of your efforts for optimizing your online business will pay off You must define crystal clear conversion metrics and goals.

But before that, you must have a clear understanding of Conversion goals, and Conversion metrics.

Conversion Goals:The main question you should ask yourself is this “What’s the most important outcome that I want to achieve from optimization experiment”? Do I want to increase Sales Or increase traffic?

Focus on the problem statement, And define the problem statement as clear as possible> Is the issue with current sales, and revenue Or the number of people whom you want to try your free product? Or Your goal is not to address any issue at all, and you just want to scale your business And take it to the next level Once you’ve defined your Goals, it’s time to set the right metric.

Conversion Metrics:It refers to the most accurate way that you will measure the success of your CRO experiment. Is it the number of subscribed emails or the number of close deals? Or is it the ratio, and increased rate in comparison to existing results? Whatever it is, you must define it clearly

Pro Tip:You can define an overall goal for your business, but when it comes to optimizing your pages for higher conversion, you must remember the golden rule of optimization:“You Should Only Set One Goal Per Page.”

Set a Baseline and monitor your Conversion rate

Setting goals for your conversion optimization strategy is not enough, Because if you don’t know about your business’ “Status Quo”, then you wouldn’t be able to measure the success of your business, and your conversion optimization tests.

That’s why the first step after defining your goals is to set a baseline.

Setting a baseline helps you have accurate reference point to monitor your progress and measure it against the current status.

To set a conversion rate baseline for your business You can use two free tools from Google. simply head to the google webmaster tools and google analytics and follow these following steps:

Essential Step in Google Search Console:

The first step is to make sure that your Sitemap is available, and has no issue. Navigate to Search Console > Crawl > Site Maps. Make sure your site map is submitted correctly. If it is not available or you found some errors in it, try resubmitting your sitemap again.

Then head to Search Console > Google Index > Index StatusTo see if all of your pages are indexed, And visible in the search engines. If for whatever reason, you’ve found that any of your pages is not indexed, Submit it to Google to crawl it manually, And fetch and render it.

Don’t forget the users who visit your pages from mobile devices. In fact, mobile visibility plays a great role in boosting your conversion rate. To take a snapshot of your Mobile usability, head to Search Console > Search Traffic > Mobile Usabilityand capture the baseline data.

Last but not least, You have to know how much are your content interesting to search engine visitors, And how many times do hey choose you over your rivalsAnd that’s all about Click Through Rate, or CTR.

To capture the baseline of your CTR,navigate toSearch Console > Search Traffic > Search Analyticsand make sure that all options like CTR, Impressions, and clicks are selected. Then you can capture Three different screenshot of this page by selecting pages, countries, and devices.

Necessary Steps in Google Analytics:

Apart from google search console, you need to record data from Google Analytics too. But at first you have to ensure that there are enough data available. So, if your website is new Or if you have not set up your analytics yet, Set it up and let it collect data for about 4 to 6 weeks. and then head to Google Analytics > Reporting > Audience > Overview. Change your setting to show you the last 30 days, and capture the screen data. You must also jot down these factors.

Bounce rate

% New Sessions

Average Session Duration

After that, you can move to Google Analytics > Reporting >Conversions > Goals > Overview.Capture the Goal Conversion Rate. Don’t worry if you have not set a goal, I’ll show you how to do it later. And finally, head to Google Analytics > Reporting > Audience > Mobile > Overview and Capture the date which is presented in tabular format.

Having the above captured information gives you a solid ground to refer to, and measure your success rate. You should save the data in a document, and call it the Original Baseline or “OBL”.

Explore your Customer’s persona

The easiest way to identify your customer’s persona is to use an empathy map. Simply use it to analyze your customer’s thoughts, feelings, attitude, challenges and needs in a collaborative way.

Empathy map is a great hypothetical method of gauging customer’s persona. It would be absolutely beneficial If you run instant experiments & interviews. There are plenty of free startup tools that enables you to conduct live experiment and engage customers when they visit your website.

Additional ways to collect data for CRO strategy.

User Survey is the easiest one.

The big mistake that many CRO strategists make is that They only focus on Quantitative data but analytics can only tell you so much about your users’ needs and behavior.

You should focus on additional ways to collect data about your visitors, and users. In fact, you need to hear it directly from users, And let them tell you about your concerns, and desires. And that’s where Surveys come to the picture.

The truth is that it was the users who have gone through the conversion funnel, and get frustrated, and then decided to drop off, Not you. SO the best way to understand why did they make such a decision is to Engage with them through a user survey at the drop off point.

You can easily ask them open ended questions and get feedback Or be smarter, And collect their email address to follow-up with them and get to know more. You can even take t one step further, and run a split test on both original version o the page, and the new one that you have designed based on your hypothesis And see how different is the result of your experiments.

These are top 5 tools that help you Conduct an efficient user survey

Qualaroo

Survey Monkey

SurveyGizmo

PollDaddy

Hotjar

Once you’ve collected the results, try to analyze them from different angels And look for repetitive Patterns Are you able spot words, terms, complains, concerns Objections, frustration, etc that are mentioned over and over? If so, consolidate them under pattern category, As it shows how significant those term are to your users.

Carefully evaluate our user’s perception about your business, And find out how do you look like in their mind. This way you can optimize your copy writing experiments and enhance your titles, taglines, and messages to appeal to your users.

But what if users are not able to articulate their problem?

Don’t worry, Fortunately, today you can find a lot of user testing software to directly observe how users interact with your site.

You can use the user testing software to find out what’s freezing you customer’s eyes Or what do they like to click more and more Or even what color is more interesting to them And to find that You can use technologies like Heat Map to track Click Density, and user engagement. Here are four examples:

Hotjar

CrazyEgg

Inspectlet.com

Segment.com

You can also use other tools to test your hypothesis and the concepts that you are experimenting and easily draft a test landing page version, Or a wire frame and get feedback regarding potential issues.

How to conduct Split Testing Experiment?

Knowing what sort of data to collect, and understanding the basics of conversion rate optimization is never enough.

That’s why Once you have gathered your data, and collected enough facts, you have to focus on conducting experiments And find the best version of your landing page that convert more than the others.

The best strategy that help you find the best version of landing page is Split testing, also known as A/B testing.

What is A/B testing, and why should you use it?

A/B testing is the most efficient method to find out What marketing strategy works best for your online business.

You can test different part of you online business such asYour widgets, and promotionsSales copyLanding pagePopups, and exit intent overlaysSearch AdsOrganic title tagsHeadlines, and Sub headlinesContents and TextSocial Proofs and TestimonialsCall to Action textCall to Action color, position, size, and ButtonAnchors, and LinksVisuals, Gifs, Animations, Infographics, Videos, and Images Pricing

Google Experiments is a free service that is already included in your Google Analytics account. Here is how to find it:

Google experiment allows you to Test a few versions of your landing page (Five to be exact)

and it’s easy to do. At first, you must create a new version of a landing page, And add the original page, As well as the new version of the landing page to Google Analytics and run the test. Let google distribute the traffic to pages, and show you the outcome in Google Content Experiments. You can then go through the analysis, and select the best page that performs better.

Find out what matters to customers? and what can lead you to achieve higher ROI?

Once the winner is found, You can analyses the patterns and optimize your pages based on those patterns. In fact, you must design your page based on Eye Magnet Shapes. Here is an interesting finding about it. In a research by Nielsen Norman Group, it was found that visitors read contents and screen landing pages following the ‘F’ shape. Yes, F for ‘four’. That’s exactly how your visitors scan and skim your content in a few seconds.

As you see in the image, Majority of the focus is on the left side of the page, And the most time spent on a page is at the top. So, the best tactic to use for designing your landing pages for higher conversion is to capture your reader’s attention by paying attention to the first two paragraphs.

You need to be strong in storytelling and intrigue your visitor with our first paragraph.

You should also consider using enough relevant visuals in your page to keep your readers engaged Because, (as long as it hurts me to say it) today, web surfers rarely read a page completely, let alone a page that only contains text.

I believe, at this stage you have a great idea about conversion rate optimization strategies, And you’re probably even started to think about how to optimize your landing page.

Then It’s time o walk you through a set ofactionable conversion optimization strategies to implement right away, and increase your website conversion rate.

I outlined 13 actionable yet super easy to implement strategies to help you optimize your website for higher conversion rate.

Reduce the number of ads & banners.

Even if your main revenue stream is through advertisement, You can still add value to your visitor’s time and provide your users with a professional design that is systematically programmed to attract customers and convert them to leads.

Try to reduce the number of ads shown on a page, And remove all of the unnecessary banners.

If you wish to promote your service to your visitors while they are on your website, You can use re-targeting strategies, And use cookie-based tools to show different offers that matches your visitors persona

Use Exit Intent Popups Don’t forget to ask at the end.

Using exit intent Popups is a great tool to ask your customers if they would consider opting-in just before they leave your website.

nudgr.io has examined 100 exit intents and found this:According to a research, you can acquire about 10% to 15% of lost visitors just by using exit-intent popups. That means, you can get another 10 to 15 percent of your visitors to respond to your well-crafted exit intent popup.

Now, if you are concerned about your professional design and look and feel of your page, you can get your programmer to use simple CSS codes and design a popup that matches your user interface.

Use The right font size.

As an online business owner, you won’t really need to spend a fortune on Redesigning your outlet, But you have to make sure that your website is presented with care.

It’s a proven fact that customers will immediately conduct the eye ball test, and make the call to either reject the website or stay a bit longer. Now, design of the pages play a huge role, But sing the right Font is among the most important factors that impact your conversion rate.

To pass the eye ball test,you must use the right font, and the right size. If your theme and template has very large or very small fonts, you can use easy hacks like html or CSS codes and change your font size to match your business.

It does not cost you a penny, but can get you a ton of more leads.

Length Matters; Write you pages with the right length.

There is no rock solid strategy to read and implement and design your page But it’s well known that , today, people are more visual, and more interested in visual contents, So, reading lengthy texts is not something that everyone likes to do.

The truth is that it all goes back to Your business nature, And the quality of your content.

For instance, The definite guide to conversion rate optimization (that you are reading now) Is among the most read contents on my website, and it has about 7000 words, Let aside the visuals.

So, it’s a myth that lengthy pages won’t work. However, including infographics, animated visuals, and videos, can help you skyrocket your conversion rate, and significantly lower your bounce rate.

Consider writing High quality, valuable and lengthy posts with minimum 1000 words and make sure to use the right keywords in your text, title, subtitles, etc.

Don’t forget to focus on problem statement, and value proposition in your first paragraph, and continue supporting your claim with actionable, step-by-step strategies or how-to guides.

Improve the readability Flesch–Kincaid grade matters to readers.

Since your main users are human, you must make sure your contents are appealing to them. Writing contents that are easily understood by common people can improve your SEO ranking and engage readers to keep reading.

The best way to write the content is to keep the sentences short and to the point, And make sure to connect them to each other.

Avoid writing long paragraphs and sentences. Instead, try to craft your contents with Flesch Reading Ease score of at least 40(the higher, the better) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of At least 10.

To know your Flesch–Kincaid grade or readability indicator, write and complete your article on Microsoft wordand then press F7.The word processor will analyze your piece of content and present you with a popup that contains your score. In case you score is not withing the acceptable range, you should consider revising your sentences, punctuation, etc. and replace difficult words with easier ones.

The world has gone mobile, Have you?

People are 5 times more likely to leave your website if it’s not mobile friendly. And that’s a proven fact by google. You want to see it yourself, Be my guest and head to test my site by Think Google and enter your URL. Google will analyze your site and show you something like this image. You can click on view the details to know your issues, and make your Website Mobile Friendly to provide better experience to mobile users.

The Faster, the better. Reduce your landing page’s Loading Time

You have maximum 5 seconds to grab your customer’s attention and imagine, You customer has to wait 5 seconds to see what have you put up on your website! That’s a disaster.

NO one likes to wait for a page to load, especially in today’s fact pace world. You can use technologies like easy load, Or Content delivery network, also known as CDN

If your visitor decides to opt-in for your lead magnet, Or buy your prduct, Or even try it for free, You shoudl make it as smooth as possible for him/her.

You really don’t need to ask them about every single details, Like their last name, Phone Nmber, Their first name, Website, Etc.

Begin with collecting one information Like Email address, Or in consulting businesses, their phone number, And initiate your engagement. Once your customer responds, You can as them for more information.

Offer a single integrated button that allows visitors to register using their email address or any preferred social media account. If you really need to know their birth day and post code, you ask them to update their profile AFTER they opt in.

Don’t forget the fact that people want to achieve things fast and in a fun way, so don’t over-complicate their interactions with your site.

Checkout Page is not an Exemption! Then Simplify Your Checkout Page too

You can destroy all of your optimization efforts by over complicating your checkout process. Psychologically, your customers would be looking for an opportunity to negotiate and get a better deal, and out of sudden you surprise them with additional fees such as VAT, Shipping, etc. That can put off a serious buyer too!

You should make the checkout process as seamless and smooth as possible, So, it would not be difficult to calculate every cost at your end and show the final price or final quote to your visitors. Something like an all-inclusive price.

Here is the trick, Lack of transparency especially in check out page, will ruin your trust-relationship and drastically drop your conversion rate.

Display trust logos

Whether you own a branded e-commerce shop or a new online business website, You need to gain your customers trust, so they feel safe to enter their credit card information, Or PayPal credentials And make the payment.

Since trust plays a great role in user acquisition, And how they decide to make any purchase from an online website or not, You can improve your growth rate by displaying trust logos such as secure payment, or “No Spam Newsletter”, Secured by (Your SSL certificate issuer) etc. and give confidence to your visitors that their personal information is safe with you.

Optimize Your Call to Action – CTA

You call to actions exist to encourage visitors to “Take Action“. Make sure to include CTA optimization goals in your CRO plan, And test a few experiments to see what type of button, What kind of message, What color, And what position helps you increase your conversion rate.

The most common mistakes that marketers do is to design a treasure hunt game for their users and make it their visitor’s mission to find the right call to action button.

Remember, the golden rules of CRO:

– Your CTA must be Visible– You must NOT use more than one call to action per page.

Every call to action in one page should serve one objective among all your predefined goals. Do your best effort to find out the best place for your call to action button, and remember the F share, So preferably at the top right or top left side of your landing page.

Write Titles to stand out

Engaging Copywriting is the secret behind successful content marketing, And Titles play a huge role in increasing your click through rate, CTR.

Using titles, and H1, H2, H3, etc. subtitles can increase your SEO ranking, but the most important factor in using Headings and titles is to convey a clear message, and encourage users to take action. The most important elements of your titles are:

or recommendations from happy customers with their picture, and link to their profile can add great value to your customer experience and ultimately your conversion rate optimization strategy

In fact, great customer experience that combines with valid social proofs not only strengthen your brand and boost your conversion rate, it also generates more revenue for your business too.

You have come a long way in this article, and I’m sure you have learned a lot about conversion rate optimization. Do me a favor, and comment below To let me know what you think about it Or share the conversion rate optimization strategies That you use,

Cheers, Ehsan

The Definitive Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization.

Wherever marketers discuss about growth hacking strategy, these days, they will always talks about Conversion rate optimization (CRO) too. And how important it is to optimize your website for higher conversion, But the first step towards understanding the Conversion optimization strategy is to fully understandWhat it is,And what it is not!

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Let me give you a few definitions: If we consider growth hacking as a chain of data-driven experiments, Then, conversion rate optimization is one of the most efficient analytical methods to improve your website’s performance to attract, and engage more customers.

In other words,

CRO refers to the most essential rules of running a successful online business; Your customers. It’s is all about understanding what your users are interested in when they visit your site, and give it to them right away.

Conversion rate optimization best practices has nothing to do with your traffic, SEO, or your brand name.

It certainly has nothing to do with guess-work, or luck.

CRO refers to a set of data-driven digital marketing experiments that help you identify which part of your landing page, website, and business should you optimize to attract more customers, and begin having high quality engagement with your visitors.

In conversion optimization experiments, a growth hacker will monitor customer behavior and customer interaction with a specific landing page and conduct a set of test to find out what landing page has the potential to generate better outcomes.

Then, the growth hacker himself/herself should analyze the data and outcome to create a conversion optimization know-how, and customer journey optimization patterns that eventually increase the conversion rate.

Since different businesses have different goals, and metrics, it’s hard to define a rock-solid method for conducting a successful conversion optimization experience but, in fact, if you set your conversion goals right, You can achieve great results and higher ROI.

Conversion optimization strategy might vary from business to business, It might lead you to change the call to action text, Polish your tone, and optimize your posts, or texts or even shifting a few UI elements, but end of the day the main outputs that you should expect from your CRO experiment are:

Higher conversion rate,

Higher customer acquisition rate.

Have you ever wondered how do some websites are so good with customer acquisition? And they break through the conversion rate optimization strategy,

and convert visitors to leads like nuts?

Well, I was wondering too, until I found this…

Whether you decide to hire a growth hacker or you want to take charge to grow your own business, there is one important factor that can never miss;

“it is conversion rate optimization.”

Whether you are launching your mobile app, or you just want to get new customers to your online business conversion rate optimization helps you analyze your online sales funnel, and optimize it for higher conversion.

In other words, whether you are running an e-commerce business, Writing a blog, or even if you are in service industry, and offering consulting services, you can easily use the conversion optimization techniques right away and

When it comes to growth hacking strategies, the rule of thumb is that all of your digital marketing strategies, including CRO must ultimately help you grow your business faster,

and this rule applies to almost every single niche.

“The good news is that in this conversion optimization guide I have outlined a set of actionable strategies that you can use for your website, and achieve higher conversion rates.”

CRO Essentials: Why should conversion optimization matter to you?

Good question.

If you plan to reduce marketing costs, and increase your revenue, while lowering your cost of customer acquisition (CAC), Then you must very much pay attention to CRO,And here is why?

For every visitor that and visit your website, you have a chance to make money and generate revenue but that does not happen just like that!

You must find out what makes your customer happier, and what could intrigue them to spend more time on your website

You can try different combinations ofBackground colors, types of visuals (Animated, or solid)Different Lead Magnets Value proposition,Specific tone of message,button text, and button color,etc.and figure out which combination appeals to majority of your visitors.

You can use the 80-20 rule and optimize your website to match their persona. This way you’re indirectly suggesting your visitors to stay longer and explore more, before switch to your rivals.

Before we move on, let me share with you a few essential abbreviations that you must remember about CRO strategy.

Call to Action (CTA)

In online business, because you don’t see your customers face to face, you need to find ways to engage with them and sell your product.

Call to actions, are in fact your Promoters, Your virtual sales person, Your Bar tender, Your driver, They exist to grab your customer’s attention, and encourage them to TAKE ACTIONS.

You may see different forms of CTA in different websites, the most popular call to actions are:Buy NowGet Instant AccessJoin NowSign Up etc.

A/B Testing, also known as Split Testing

A/B testing is a process of experimenting different versions of a landing page and sending equal amount of traffic to the pages to see which page converts more visitors to leads, Or which page engages better with visitors, or which page do users like to explore more (It all may vary based on your KPI, metrics, and goals)

Once the best page is identified, you can make that page as your primary page, and drive 100% of traffic to the most effective page.

In other words, higher conversion rate can lead to higher ROI, efficient customer acquisition strategy, happier customers, and lower cost of marketing.

Conversion Funnel

Simply speaking, conversion funnels of online businesses is the shortest/most efficient way that a user can find what s/he is looking for and either purchase, or acquire it.

For example, When you go to EBay, or Amazon, You’ll either use the search functionality on home page, Or you’re directly coming from search engines like google, And you’ll land on the product page. Then you’ll make the purchase and receive your product.That’s an example of a conversion funnel.

The true nature, and classification of conversion rate optimization won’t change but the result will vary based on your defined goals.

Let’s have a closer look at a few scenarios and see how can you optimize your conversion rates.

Scenario #1: Increase Revenue:

If your goal is to increase your revenue, then the conversion rate you must look into should be the number of customers who bought your products, packages, or solutions VS the total number of people who showed interest in it.

Scenario #2: Get more Leads

In case you are trying to get more leads and engage them in your sales funnel, you should monitor your conversion rate base on the number of people who are approached (or they might approach you) against the number of qualified leads.

Scenario #3: Brand Awareness

In the event that you are looking for better brand awareness, then you should not be looking for tangible results in short term. However, if you implement re-targeting strategies (I’ll get to this soon), you can monitor your ROI conversion rate.

Lead Conversion Funnel Versus Sales Funnel

When it comes to advanced growth hacking, and scaling your business Your sales funnel should look like this.

You must define your source of traffic, And drive each customer segment to the right landing page.

In many businesses, their sales funnel looks like this: The first step is acquiring leads. It normally happens by getting in touch with customers, either through cold calls, email campaigns or face to face meeting, etc.

As soon as you have the lead’s attention you’ll focus on proving your value proposition and convert the lead to opportunity. (It means the lead is interested in knowing more about your offer)

Then, once you anticipate that the success rate and probability of closing the deal you’d go ahead and pitch the customer and sell your product or service.(There are a lot more to it but since this article is not about sales strategy, I simplified it as much as possible)

The conversion funnel is somehow different

In general, conversion funnel has 4 phases:

In the early stages, the customers will get to know about your offer, and your business

If they are interested, they will research about your product, your promise, and indeed your business conduct

If you manage to build a good reputation, and they hear good things from others, they will most probably try your Offer

Once your service is proven to be worthy of what you charge for, and can address their pains and gains, they will then make a payment and buy your core offer.

Now if you are here for a long haul and take care of your customers, and if they really like your product, they will recommend it to others or tell others about it, which leads to referrals and new customers.

Implementing conversion optimization strategy and aligning it with your sales funnel help you supersize your packages, and increase your revenue. But it all goes back to your your business model, type of product, and nature of your business.

The first thing that you’ve setup to get your customer’s contact information is your lead magnet, And your lead magnet is a free report, or a free download, or a free trial, etc. Something that does not cost you much to create, And customers can get it instantly, for free.

In this case your conversion funnel should look like this.

The first step is “Customer Discovery”

You’ll be directing traffic to your website, It could be from Direct, and organic traffic, Or Advertisement campaigns like PPC, OR Forums, etc. and once visitors are landed on your landing pages, they will come to know about your blog posts, Your lead magnet, or even your product, and pay a visit to your product page.

The trick here is to implement “customer journey optimization” strategy also known as CJO strategy to engage with your visitors, and lead the through the path that translate to a purchase, or an opt-in

Because customers who come from different source, have different needs.

The Next step is Engagement

Influencer marketing, and branding play a huge role at this stage because since customers don’t have a tool to measure your credibility, they will use the eye ball test.

If you manage to pass the eye ball test, By showing enough evidence that your business is credible, Or social proofs from previous customers, Or even positive reviews on the internet, you have a good chance to see your prospects in the next stage.

It’s time for your customers to Register

Here is the truth:

Unfortunately, since there are plenty of scams, no one is willing to buy from you the first time they visit your site.

At this stage, it’s best to offer a lead magnet, and don’t push for sales. You can try to encourage them to opt-in to your subscriber list by offering a well-designed whitepaper to download, or something that fits their need without charging them.

Once your visitors decided to exchange their information for your lead magnet, it’s time for a little push.

Let’s give it a try! The Trial Phase

Your customers might not be ready to buy your core offer yet, So you can offer them your Bait, Which is an interesting offer that offers between 7% to 20% of functionalities of your core product “at cost“, “with no margin“. or even for free

If what you’ve offered them for free in previous stage was a case study about the values of your product And they have opted in with that free report, You can offer them a comprehensive, or premium report Plus limited access to your product for testing purpose Either for free, at a very low cost or great value for money, This way, your leads will automatically move don your conversion funnel, and download/try your trial product.

Promotion: When and what to promote to get higher conversion rate

Don’t be a greedy business owner who just care about dollars and figures. You must give enough time to your customers and let them enjoy the free trial, but you should also engage with them and make sure they are getting the best out of their offer.

In fact, the secret to having higher conversion rate, especially when it comes to converting leads to paying customers is in genuine follow ups during the trial period.

You must know that not everyone knows how to use your product, besides, they might sign up for free trial and don’t even use it.

As an entrepreneur or a growth hacker, you can automate your engagements for trial period, but you must make sure to personalize it too.

You can send them the “how-to guides” and practical, yet, easy to understand supporting materials to help them understand your unique value proposition and fall in love with your product.

Closing The Deal

This is where your leads, and opportunities convert to paying customers.At this stage, you managed to get your customers on your landing page, or checkout page And they are ready to key in the credit card information.

Make sure that your sales letter, whether it’s a Video sales letter (VSL), or a Hybrid sales letter Includes everything that your customer need to know

Include your Pricing model And try to simplify it as much as possible If there are payment plans, try to highlight the one that managed to attract more customers in your conversion rate optimization experiments And make sure to simplify your checkout forms.

Once your customer paid for your service,

… It does not matter if you are offering a tangible product, or virtual product,Or even if you are selling one off services, or your product is designed with recurring pricing model …

You must focus on Email marketing activities to engage with your new customers to ensure your customers are happy with their purchase. And your value proposition is well perceived,

In fact, if you manage to keep your customers happy, You can get them back to buy again Or refer you to their friends and get new customers, organically.

How to Design a Conversion Rate Optimization Plan

The basis of CRO strategies are on valid data And you need to collect valid data, as much as possible But not any data!

While those data are very important You must make sure that you’re analyzing your customer behavior too

If you have a solid data-mine to begin with, That’s perfect, Otherwise build your plan based on hypothesis and do your best to find the validity of your hypothesis.

Why should you collect data?

One of the most important lessons I learned after spending $252,000 on conversion rate optimization is the importance of gathering both qualitative and quantitative data before beginning to test. If you don’t gather data, then you’re left guessing what to change based on your gut. This isn’t a good idea and can lead to wasted time and money. It’s better to spend a month or so gathering data so you’re testing based on insights you’ve learned, not on your gut feeling. Without taking this step, you’ll end up running a lot of tests that fail.

What to test in your CRO plan?

Try to understand what these data, numbers, and interactions means before proposing a solution

Concentrate on testing your hypothesis, no proving them. You can easily pivot and find a better strategy

Keep an open mind when analyzing your data, Being Bios about your goals may interfere your interpretation

Don’t interrupt the experiment, and run each test for at least a month; Remember conversion optimization is an ongoing strategy

How to collect data?

There are free and paid tools that help you collect data. You need to use the right tools to collect data about

Number of unique visitors

Bounce rate

Overall traffic from different sources

New Vs Existing users

Cohort Analysis

Segmentation

Goal and conversion analysis,

etc.

Here is a list of five popular tools that you can use for your conversion optimization experiments.

Qualaroo

Google Analytics (free)

KISSMetrics

Mixpanel

Segment.io

Now, if you don’t have a budget to spend on paid analytics tools, you can use the most powerful free tool …

As a webmaster you have already setup your google analytics, and google search console. Why not using them?

Once you logged in to your Google Analytics dashboard, Scroll down, and go to Conversions.

If you don’t see any result, It’s probably because you have not set your Conversion goals. Once you set a few conversion goals, and let Google Analytics collect data for a week or so, You will be able to monitor your conversion goals, and analyze data for conversion optimization purposes.

While it’s tempting to look at the conversion results, the most important factor is to look for drop offs, and find out what have you missed. How many customers have you lost and Why that happened?

You need to have a close look at your conversion funnel and Find out what stage of your funnel are you loosing visitors, and leads. And focus on optimizing it and consider what changes you can possibly make to increase conversion rate.

As soon as you’ve spotted the drop offs, you can write your first hypothesis for each step of your conversion funnel It might be the Content that need to be optimized, It might be the page speed, or loading time, it could be the font size, etc. etc.

How does Conversion Optimization Help You Improve User Experience (UX).

The way we look at user experience in growth hacking, customer acquisition, and conversion rate optimization is totally different from Branding and Design stand point.

Al thought these strategies are all connected, and should complement each other, At this stage we are not concern about how does your website look Because Customer journey optimization, and User Experience should take to account the essential CRO elements such as

– How easy can your visitors Navigate through your website– How easy it is to find the right product or service on your site– How fast does it load the pages.– How user friendly is your sales process, and check out page.– etc…

Apart from dozens of benefits that a great UX bring to your business, paying attention to your user experience can help you reduce two disastrous factors that kills your conversion rate.

Exit Rate

Exit Rate is factor that you need to monitor for each page. Exit rate has negative impact on your conversion rate because it refers to the percentage of visitors who did not take any action and left the website.

Because the exit rate shows you the last age before your visitors leave, you can focus on increasing the user experience in those pages, and conduct a few experiments to see what makes people leave without taking any actions.

If you’re experiencing very high exit rate on your product page That could indicate that you’re either not able to connect with your visitors through your Value proposition Or you have either over-priced, or under-priced your service, Or your sales letter and copy writing is not engaging Or maybe there is a technical issue with the landing page.

Bounce Rate

Your Bounce Rate is another factor you have to closely monitor.

The lower the bounce rate the better, Because it refers to the number of visitors who don’t move on to the next page, and leave your website as soon as they land on the firs page. Since every page has its own bounce rate, you can investigate the main reason that visitors leave and optimize the page for higher conversion.[I have explained everything here about how to optimize your landing page and improve your bounce rate]

How to set conversion goals?

To make sure that all of your efforts for optimizing your online business will pay off You must define crystal clear conversion metrics and goals.

But before that, you must have a clear understanding of Conversion goals, and Conversion metrics.

Conversion Goals:The main question you should ask yourself is this “What’s the most important outcome that I want to achieve from optimization experiment”? Do I want to increase Sales Or increase traffic?

Focus on the problem statement, And define the problem statement as clear as possible> Is the issue with current sales, and revenue Or the number of people whom you want to try your free product? Or Your goal is not to address any issue at all, and you just want to scale your business And take it to the next level Once you’ve defined your Goals, it’s time to set the right metric.

Conversion Metrics:It refers to the most accurate way that you will measure the success of your CRO experiment. Is it the number of subscribed emails or the number of close deals? Or is it the ratio, and increased rate in comparison to existing results? Whatever it is, you must define it clearly

Pro Tip:You can define an overall goal for your business, but when it comes to optimizing your pages for higher conversion, you must remember the golden rule of optimization:“You Should Only Set One Goal Per Page.”

Set a Baseline and monitor your Conversion rate

Setting goals for your conversion optimization strategy is not enough, Because if you don’t know about your business’ “Status Quo”, then you wouldn’t be able to measure the success of your business, and your conversion optimization tests.

That’s why the first step after defining your goals is to set a baseline.

Setting a baseline helps you have accurate reference point to monitor your progress and measure it against the current status.

To set a conversion rate baseline for your business You can use two free tools from Google. simply head to the google webmaster tools and google analytics and follow these following steps:

Essential Step in Google Search Console:

The first step is to make sure that your Sitemap is available, and has no issue. Navigate to Search Console > Crawl > Site Maps. Make sure your site map is submitted correctly. If it is not available or you found some errors in it, try resubmitting your sitemap again.

Then head to Search Console > Google Index > Index StatusTo see if all of your pages are indexed, And visible in the search engines. If for whatever reason, you’ve found that any of your pages is not indexed, Submit it to Google to crawl it manually, And fetch and render it.

Don’t forget the users who visit your pages from mobile devices. In fact, mobile visibility plays a great role in boosting your conversion rate. To take a snapshot of your Mobile usability, head to Search Console > Search Traffic > Mobile Usabilityand capture the baseline data.

Last but not least, You have to know how much are your content interesting to search engine visitors, And how many times do hey choose you over your rivalsAnd that’s all about Click Through Rate, or CTR.

To capture the baseline of your CTR,navigate toSearch Console > Search Traffic > Search Analyticsand make sure that all options like CTR, Impressions, and clicks are selected. Then you can capture Three different screenshot of this page by selecting pages, countries, and devices.

Necessary Steps in Google Analytics:

Apart from google search console, you need to record data from Google Analytics too. But at first you have to ensure that there are enough data available. So, if your website is new Or if you have not set up your analytics yet, Set it up and let it collect data for about 4 to 6 weeks. and then head to Google Analytics > Reporting > Audience > Overview. Change your setting to show you the last 30 days, and capture the screen data. You must also jot down these factors.

Bounce rate

% New Sessions

Average Session Duration

After that, you can move to Google Analytics > Reporting >Conversions > Goals > Overview.Capture the Goal Conversion Rate. Don’t worry if you have not set a goal, I’ll show you how to do it later. And finally, head to Google Analytics > Reporting > Audience > Mobile > Overview and Capture the date which is presented in tabular format.

Having the above captured information gives you a solid ground to refer to, and measure your success rate. You should save the data in a document, and call it the Original Baseline or “OBL”.

Explore your Customer’s persona

The easiest way to identify your customer’s persona is to use an empathy map. Simply use it to analyze your customer’s thoughts, feelings, attitude, challenges and needs in a collaborative way.

Empathy map is a great hypothetical method of gauging customer’s persona. It would be absolutely beneficial If you run instant experiments & interviews. There are plenty of free startup tools that enables you to conduct live experiment and engage customers when they visit your website.

Additional ways to collect data for CRO strategy.

User Survey is the easiest one.

The big mistake that many CRO strategists make is that They only focus on Quantitative data but analytics can only tell you so much about your users’ needs and behavior.

You should focus on additional ways to collect data about your visitors, and users. In fact, you need to hear it directly from users, And let them tell you about your concerns, and desires. And that’s where Surveys come to the picture.

The truth is that it was the users who have gone through the conversion funnel, and get frustrated, and then decided to drop off, Not you. SO the best way to understand why did they make such a decision is to Engage with them through a user survey at the drop off point.

You can easily ask them open ended questions and get feedback Or be smarter, And collect their email address to follow-up with them and get to know more. You can even take t one step further, and run a split test on both original version o the page, and the new one that you have designed based on your hypothesis And see how different is the result of your experiments.

These are top 5 tools that help you Conduct an efficient user survey

Qualaroo

Survey Monkey

SurveyGizmo

PollDaddy

Hotjar

Once you’ve collected the results, try to analyze them from different angels And look for repetitive Patterns Are you able spot words, terms, complains, concerns Objections, frustration, etc that are mentioned over and over? If so, consolidate them under pattern category, As it shows how significant those term are to your users.

Carefully evaluate our user’s perception about your business, And find out how do you look like in their mind. This way you can optimize your copy writing experiments and enhance your titles, taglines, and messages to appeal to your users.

But what if users are not able to articulate their problem?

Don’t worry, Fortunately, today you can find a lot of user testing software to directly observe how users interact with your site.

You can use the user testing software to find out what’s freezing you customer’s eyes Or what do they like to click more and more Or even what color is more interesting to them And to find that You can use technologies like Heat Map to track Click Density, and user engagement. Here are four examples:

Hotjar

CrazyEgg

Inspectlet.com

Segment.com

You can also use other tools to test your hypothesis and the concepts that you are experimenting and easily draft a test landing page version, Or a wire frame and get feedback regarding potential issues.

How to conduct Split Testing Experiment?

Knowing what sort of data to collect, and understanding the basics of conversion rate optimization is never enough.

That’s why Once you have gathered your data, and collected enough facts, you have to focus on conducting experiments And find the best version of your landing page that convert more than the others.

The best strategy that help you find the best version of landing page is Split testing, also known as A/B testing.

What is A/B testing, and why should you use it?

A/B testing is the most efficient method to find out What marketing strategy works best for your online business.

You can test different part of you online business such asYour widgets, and promotionsSales copyLanding pagePopups, and exit intent overlaysSearch AdsOrganic title tagsHeadlines, and Sub headlinesContents and TextSocial Proofs and TestimonialsCall to Action textCall to Action color, position, size, and ButtonAnchors, and LinksVisuals, Gifs, Animations, Infographics, Videos, and Images Pricing

Google Experiments is a free service that is already included in your Google Analytics account. Here is how to find it:

Google experiment allows you to Test a few versions of your landing page (Five to be exact)

and it’s easy to do. At first, you must create a new version of a landing page, And add the original page, As well as the new version of the landing page to Google Analytics and run the test. Let google distribute the traffic to pages, and show you the outcome in Google Content Experiments. You can then go through the analysis, and select the best page that performs better.

Find out what matters to customers? and what can lead you to achieve higher ROI?

Once the winner is found, You can analyses the patterns and optimize your pages based on those patterns. In fact, you must design your page based on Eye Magnet Shapes. Here is an interesting finding about it. In a research by Nielsen Norman Group, it was found that visitors read contents and screen landing pages following the ‘F’ shape. Yes, F for ‘four’. That’s exactly how your visitors scan and skim your content in a few seconds.

As you see in the image, Majority of the focus is on the left side of the page, And the most time spent on a page is at the top. So, the best tactic to use for designing your landing pages for higher conversion is to capture your reader’s attention by paying attention to the first two paragraphs.

You need to be strong in storytelling and intrigue your visitor with our first paragraph.

You should also consider using enough relevant visuals in your page to keep your readers engaged Because, (as long as it hurts me to say it) today, web surfers rarely read a page completely, let alone a page that only contains text.

I believe, at this stage you have a great idea about conversion rate optimization strategies, And you’re probably even started to think about how to optimize your landing page.

Then It’s time o walk you through a set ofactionable conversion optimization strategies to implement right away, and increase your website conversion rate.

I outlined 13 actionable yet super easy to implement strategies to help you optimize your website for higher conversion rate.

Reduce the number of ads & banners.

Even if your main revenue stream is through advertisement, You can still add value to your visitor’s time and provide your users with a professional design that is systematically programmed to attract customers and convert them to leads.

Try to reduce the number of ads shown on a page, And remove all of the unnecessary banners.

If you wish to promote your service to your visitors while they are on your website, You can use re-targeting strategies, And use cookie-based tools to show different offers that matches your visitors persona

Use Exit Intent Popups Don’t forget to ask at the end.

Using exit intent Popups is a great tool to ask your customers if they would consider opting-in just before they leave your website.

nudgr.io has examined 100 exit intents and found this:According to a research, you can acquire about 10% to 15% of lost visitors just by using exit-intent popups. That means, you can get another 10 to 15 percent of your visitors to respond to your well-crafted exit intent popup.

Now, if you are concerned about your professional design and look and feel of your page, you can get your programmer to use simple CSS codes and design a popup that matches your user interface.

Use The right font size.

As an online business owner, you won’t really need to spend a fortune on Redesigning your outlet, But you have to make sure that your website is presented with care.

It’s a proven fact that customers will immediately conduct the eye ball test, and make the call to either reject the website or stay a bit longer. Now, design of the pages play a huge role, But sing the right Font is among the most important factors that impact your conversion rate.

To pass the eye ball test,you must use the right font, and the right size. If your theme and template has very large or very small fonts, you can use easy hacks like html or CSS codes and change your font size to match your business.

It does not cost you a penny, but can get you a ton of more leads.

Length Matters; Write you pages with the right length.

There is no rock solid strategy to read and implement and design your page But it’s well known that , today, people are more visual, and more interested in visual contents, So, reading lengthy texts is not something that everyone likes to do.

The truth is that it all goes back to Your business nature, And the quality of your content.

For instance, The definite guide to conversion rate optimization (that you are reading now) Is among the most read contents on my website, and it has about 7000 words, Let aside the visuals.

So, it’s a myth that lengthy pages won’t work. However, including infographics, animated visuals, and videos, can help you skyrocket your conversion rate, and significantly lower your bounce rate.

Consider writing High quality, valuable and lengthy posts with minimum 1000 words and make sure to use the right keywords in your text, title, subtitles, etc.

Don’t forget to focus on problem statement, and value proposition in your first paragraph, and continue supporting your claim with actionable, step-by-step strategies or how-to guides.

Improve the readability Flesch–Kincaid grade matters to readers.

Since your main users are human, you must make sure your contents are appealing to them. Writing contents that are easily understood by common people can improve your SEO ranking and engage readers to keep reading.

The best way to write the content is to keep the sentences short and to the point, And make sure to connect them to each other.

Avoid writing long paragraphs and sentences. Instead, try to craft your contents with Flesch Reading Ease score of at least 40(the higher, the better) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of At least 10.

To know your Flesch–Kincaid grade or readability indicator, write and complete your article on Microsoft wordand then press F7.The word processor will analyze your piece of content and present you with a popup that contains your score. In case you score is not withing the acceptable range, you should consider revising your sentences, punctuation, etc. and replace difficult words with easier ones.

The world has gone mobile, Have you?

People are 5 times more likely to leave your website if it’s not mobile friendly. And that’s a proven fact by google. You want to see it yourself, Be my guest and head to test my site by Think Google and enter your URL. Google will analyze your site and show you something like this image. You can click on view the details to know your issues, and make your Website Mobile Friendly to provide better experience to mobile users.

The Faster, the better. Reduce your landing page’s Loading Time

You have maximum 5 seconds to grab your customer’s attention and imagine, You customer has to wait 5 seconds to see what have you put up on your website! That’s a disaster.

NO one likes to wait for a page to load, especially in today’s fact pace world. You can use technologies like easy load, Or Content delivery network, also known as CDN

If your visitor decides to opt-in for your lead magnet, Or buy your prduct, Or even try it for free, You shoudl make it as smooth as possible for him/her.

You really don’t need to ask them about every single details, Like their last name, Phone Nmber, Their first name, Website, Etc.

Begin with collecting one information Like Email address, Or in consulting businesses, their phone number, And initiate your engagement. Once your customer responds, You can as them for more information.

Offer a single integrated button that allows visitors to register using their email address or any preferred social media account. If you really need to know their birth day and post code, you ask them to update their profile AFTER they opt in.

Don’t forget the fact that people want to achieve things fast and in a fun way, so don’t over-complicate their interactions with your site.

Checkout Page is not an Exemption! Then Simplify Your Checkout Page too

You can destroy all of your optimization efforts by over complicating your checkout process. Psychologically, your customers would be looking for an opportunity to negotiate and get a better deal, and out of sudden you surprise them with additional fees such as VAT, Shipping, etc. That can put off a serious buyer too!

You should make the checkout process as seamless and smooth as possible, So, it would not be difficult to calculate every cost at your end and show the final price or final quote to your visitors. Something like an all-inclusive price.

Here is the trick, Lack of transparency especially in check out page, will ruin your trust-relationship and drastically drop your conversion rate.

Display trust logos

Whether you own a branded e-commerce shop or a new online business website, You need to gain your customers trust, so they feel safe to enter their credit card information, Or PayPal credentials And make the payment.

Since trust plays a great role in user acquisition, And how they decide to make any purchase from an online website or not, You can improve your growth rate by displaying trust logos such as secure payment, or “No Spam Newsletter”, Secured by (Your SSL certificate issuer) etc. and give confidence to your visitors that their personal information is safe with you.

Optimize Your Call to Action – CTA

You call to actions exist to encourage visitors to “Take Action“. Make sure to include CTA optimization goals in your CRO plan, And test a few experiments to see what type of button, What kind of message, What color, And what position helps you increase your conversion rate.

The most common mistakes that marketers do is to design a treasure hunt game for their users and make it their visitor’s mission to find the right call to action button.

Remember, the golden rules of CRO:

– Your CTA must be Visible– You must NOT use more than one call to action per page.

Every call to action in one page should serve one objective among all your predefined goals. Do your best effort to find out the best place for your call to action button, and remember the F share, So preferably at the top right or top left side of your landing page.

Write Titles to stand out

Engaging Copywriting is the secret behind successful content marketing, And Titles play a huge role in increasing your click through rate, CTR.

Using titles, and H1, H2, H3, etc. subtitles can increase your SEO ranking, but the most important factor in using Headings and titles is to convey a clear message, and encourage users to take action. The most important elements of your titles are:

or recommendations from happy customers with their picture, and link to their profile can add great value to your customer experience and ultimately your conversion rate optimization strategy

In fact, great customer experience that combines with valid social proofs not only strengthen your brand and boost your conversion rate, it also generates more revenue for your business too.

You have come a long way in this article, and I’m sure you have learned a lot about conversion rate optimization. Do me a favor, and comment below To let me know what you think about it Or share the conversion rate optimization strategies That you use,